Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Martha is the main protagonist of a five-novel series called
The Children of Violence [published from 1952 to 1969] written by Doris
Lessing. It begins in southern Rhodesia where Martha lives on a farm with her
parents. Her mother tries to maintain a proper British household, controlling
her children. Her father has been maimed by World War I. Rage and bitterness
fill the house. Martha spends her time reading everything she can get her hands
on. The elemental African landscape also sustains her. In a memorable image, we
see Martha in a grass-stained yellow dress, reading and smoking, a gun across
her lap.

To get away from home, Martha takes a job in Salisbury.
Though she has been reading leftist texts, she is at the mercy of the currents
swirling around her and falls in with a careless middle class group. She
marries at 19 and has a child, Caroline, right away. But she is full of anger
at the colonial attitudes she runs into. Her ideals compel her to take
responsibility for them. When she leaves her marriage to again take up work of
her own, her husband refuses to let her see Caroline. She tells her child, “I’m
leaving to change this ugly world. You must live in a beautiful world with no
race hatred or injustice.”

Martha then joins a group of communists, the Left Book Club,
who are fiercely opposed to the color bar in Rhodesia. The meetings of the
group are a study in personalities, as factionalism dominates. Martha marries
the ideologue leader of the group, Anton, rather than the more human Athen.
World War II intervenes, but nothing is accomplished. Black people’s struggles
are unchanged and the whites have a naïve lack of insight into their lives.
Martha’s growth, however, makes her a traitor to the race and class she was
born into.

After the war, Martha’s marriage and her faith in the
leftist group disintegrate. She is somewhat at sea, though she has an affair
with a Polish ex-patriate which brings her some happiness. She begins to look
back on her idealism and tries to make sense of things. She leaves Africa for
London in 1949.

London is still recovering from the war. It is dirty and has
no good food or nice clothing. Martha, after wandering around a bit, becomes
secretary to Mark Coleridge, an author, and moves into the troubled Coleridge household.
Lynda, Mark’s wife, is in an asylum, and his son Frances is joined by Mark’s
nephew Paul, whose physicist father has defected to Russia and whose mother has
committed suicide. Photographers and journalists surround the house. Martha
keeps house. When this crisis dies down, Lynda moves into the basement with her
helper Dorothy.

Though at first she tries to leave, Martha becomes the
nurturer who holds the household together. She and Mark are lovers, though Mark
longs for Lynda, who cannot bear his touch. Martha is wise and restrained,
watching the young people as London changes, becoming the swinging city of the
1960’s. All of them participate in the protest marches from London to the
Aldermaston atomic weapons research labs each Easter.

As the young people grow up, Martha spends more time with
Lynda, exploring her inner space and experimenting with what fasting and not
sleeping do to her perceptions. Martha wonders whether people designated mad by
society are simply not more aware of what is going on. Evil acts are born of
not being self-aware. In the end, the cataclysmic nuclear event which hangs
over the narrative, happens. Martha survives, living on the west coast of
England, helped by the young people.

Reading the Martha Quest books during my own period of self
development and questioning, I was very grateful for Doris Lessing’s honesty
and her capacious world-view. At the time, we were all exploring our
perceptions, trying to expand our human potential. Though I didn’t have the
crushing pessimism which led Lessing to her conclusions, I am not afraid of
looking at things squarely, partly because of her example. Her books underscore
the fact that one’s personal life is always political.

About Me

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